Wednesday, 28 September 2016

‘Love
Poem’ is an archetypal ‘Jack Underwood’ poem.(Can we say that about a poet with only one full collection under his
belt, albeit an excellent and almost bilious-attack inducingly self-assured one?Sure, why the hell not?)It creates a persona – which we’ll call ‘Jack
Underwood’ for the sake of clarity, or ‘JU’ for short, to distinguish him from
the author Jack Underwood, or JU for short – that’s observant and fidgety and
self-reflexive, even perhaps to the point of neurosis.There’s a real sense here of the world seen
and experienced, of a life lived and observed with clarity.Perhaps too much clarity, all told, for
there’s a darkness underpinning ‘Love Poem’, or at the very least melancholy at
odds with the positive note struck by the title [1].‘JU’ as a character is, it seems, rather
fragile, even agoraphobic, whose every thought is a ‘housefly’ – for the
record, I’ve never come across a more precise image for the way whole days can
be frittered away amidst the nervous buzz and flicker of low level depression –
and whose days are ‘gnaw[ed]’ at as the speaker waits for the object of his
affections to return home.(The same
anxiety is writ large in ‘Inventory of Friends’, and a similar emotional
register recurs in a minor key throughout the collection.)It is a portrait of love, then, as absence:
something radically needed by a consciousness preternaturally unsure of itself.

2:

“All this fear, like a fizz building in a
bad, grey egg,

is waiting for you.”

(from
‘Poem of Fear for My Future Child’)

Here
is another poem hesitating and finding its fullest expression in the fissure
between unspeakable love and insuperable anxiety.Here JU, through the mouthpiece of ‘JU’,
manages to express – refreshingly sans
schmaltz, which is what’s normally at the top of the menu when it comes to
poets writing about their goddamn children – the horror of dependence and
unconditional love.Put it this way: when
we have nothing or no-one to care for but ourselves, we can be pretty blithely
indifferent to the terrors that might be lurking out there in the world, except
at those (hopefully rare) points when said terrors come into sharper focus to
impact significantly upon our previously cosseted lives.Yet the moment we’re provided with another
life to care for, the ratio of terror to safety (or at least neutrality) in the
outer world is instantaneously reversed: we are at the mercy of the universe’s
nihilistic caprices in a way we had never before imagined, not because the
universe has suddenly become more nihilistically capricious (how could it, to
be honest?), but because we are suddenly expected to have some kind of
authority, however partial; some means of countering, however briefly, those
same nihilistic caprices, the anxieties no doubt induced by those expectations compounded
and amplified by our recognition of our ultimate failure in the face of those
expectations.That Underwood chooses to
write about these fears and anxieties in such darkly comic terms – “I am such a
dreadful future father; / I’m on the curb, crying, I’m a mess with your scarf” –
does nothing to undermine the economical skill with which he’s expressed one of
the most appalling paradoxes in the whole panoply of human affairs, namely this:
without love, we have no purpose; with love, we have no power.

PS:For anyone doubting the veracity of Underwood’s
startling image choice here, I can attest that ‘bad’ eggs are definitively ‘grey’.The only time I have encountered such a
specimen in over three decades of pretty uninterrupted egg-consumption was a
few years back.I had boiled an egg for
my breakfast and was looking forward to the ‘small happiness’ of cracking its
top, and sliding my spoon into the gently resistant egg-flesh, before prising
its lid clean off and prodding a buttery sliver of toast into the turmeric-coloured
honey of its just-undercooked yolk.But horribly,
impossibly, my spoon met no resistance whatsoever, and once the lid was
removed, what was revealed was a tiny witch’s cauldron of battleship-grey
tapioca that gave off a cornea-sizzling, sulphurous hum.Needless to say, I did not eat an egg after
that for some days.

We’re
back to love again with this poem, which Happiness
as a whole seems to be setting up as the opposite, or at least the sun-dappled,
socially well-adjusted twin, of anxiety.The recurring imagery of the egg begins to make some kind of sense now;
it’s not simply an idiosyncrasy on Underwood’s part, but a schema, a component
of Underwood’s – gasp! – imaginative nexus.In ‘Poem of Fear…’, the simile-egg’s gone bad due to a ‘fizz’ of fear, a
build-up of anxiety that’s somehow festered at its heart to render it rotten
and unpalatable.In this instance, the
egg – tied to love of instead of its antipode – is remade, packed with promise
and joy and poetry (see, for example, this analogy for the creative act: “when
you dunk / gorgeously in, softly exploding the yolk / like a new idea finding
one coloured term / for its articulation.”) Would it be too much to allow for the
possibility that Underwood might be drawing on a tradition of philosophical
enquiry that conceives of the egg as an analogue or diagrammatic illustration
of the human soul?Almost certainly, but
I’m going to do it anyway.

4:

“I am so big today I push

my finger to the earth’s
yolk and erupt it

like a boil.”

(from
‘Oversize’)

Another
exploding egg!Again, the egg is made to
do an astonishing degree of imagistic and philosophical heavy-lifting, here deployed
as a simile in Underwood’s imaginative casting of himself as a planet-smashing
giant, unleashing an annihilating runnel of lava on a whim, suggesting an
apocalyptic scenario to which not even a visionary genius of the calibre of a Michael
Bay or a Zack Snyder could do justice.More seriously, though, it’s a perfect instance of a tendency that I think
Underwood’s mastered throughout Happiness:
namely the yo(l)king (ha!) together of the domestic and the cosmic, of the
palatable quotidian and the almost unimaginably infinite (‘Spring’’s image of “millions
of photons whoosh[ing] through my hands,” and ‘Some Gods’’s iteration of
small-scale, mundane (in the old sense) spirituality are two of the more overt
instances, but it’s a preoccupation that permeates many of the other poems).In fact, this feels like a good summation of
Underwood’s project throughout Happiness:
these poems, both singly and considered as a collective, read as attempts to
encompass an entire life, from the immediate reality of a beautifully rendered
domesticity (the cleaning, the cooking, the cricket [2]), to broader concerns
relating to love, grief, anxiety, and doubt.That Underwood manages to do all of this while eschewing the lazily and
humourlessly epiphanous – “I was chopping some tomatoes and thought about my
place in the universe, yeah?” – is arguably his biggest achievement.

5:

“No clue as to how the garlic taste

is getting in the eggs…”

(from
‘Reading the Milk’)

I
have two theories here:

(1)
If the eggs are being laid by local chickens, either the speaker’s own or those
of a neighbour, it’s possible – given that chickens are absolute demons when it
comes to decimating edible greenery – that the birds in question have access to
a patch of ramsons, and are eating them in sufficient quantities to radically affect
the flavour of their ovulations.

(2)
Alternatively, if the eggs are being kept in the kitchen near garlic, they may
be acquiring the taste vicariously, as it were.Eggs are particularly susceptible to absorbing strong neighbouring
flavours due to their semi-porous membranes, a fact I learned from an episode
of Great British Railway Journeys, in
which Michael Portillo, who increasingly resembles a kind of rail-bound riposte
to Quantum Leap’s Sam Beckett,
sampled the delights of ‘buttered eggs’ in a market stall in Cork.

===

[1]
Although when were love poems ever expressions of anything other than
anguish?I guess in that sense,
Underwood’s poem is part of a grand tradition that sucks in Sappho and
Shakespeare and Thomas Wyatt and Keats and all the others; what marks him out
is the bald way in which he foregrounds the form’s tradition of anguish at the
expense of anything else.

Saturday, 24 September 2016

Learning another language usually involves moments when you
encounter other people speaking that language.I live and work in an environment where I hear multiple languages every
day (one of my two university departments has upwards of 75 nationalities in its
undergraduate community), but I’m yet to overhear a Yiddish conversation on the
bus to campus or in the coffee queue. Part of this is geographical context – I’m
reliably informed that in certain areas of Montreal you can overhear Hassidic
kids talking about their radio controlled cars in Yiddish, but in the Midlands
that’s less than likely. In fact, the only time I’ve heard Yiddish spoken in
the street is when I’m already involved in the conversation. The upside of this
situation is that I get to indulge my linguistic path-finding fantasies by using
Yiddish in locations where it might never have been heard before. I’m not sure
if it’s cultural pride or just straight up contrariness that means I’ve
learnt Yiddish grammar on a beach in Suffolk, shouted Yiddish threats on the
East Sussex marshes and written Yiddish greetings in the sand of North Norfolk,
but it’s great fun either way.

What this lack of casually overheard Yiddish means is that I’m
hyper-alert to those moments when it turns up in films and on television. As
previously discussed, the internet means that I can go online and find the most
wonderful examples of spoken Yiddish, but it’s these chance encounters that I
really love. Even before I started learning Yiddish properly, every time a
Yiddish word showed up on screen it made me happy. Historically, the huge
majority of these random snippets were jokes and insults, which I usually
understood but which expanded my vocabulary nonetheless. A special shout-out
here to The Goonies (both Yiddish and Hebrew there, thanks to the
inimitable Chunk) and The Simpsons,
which has done more for the cause of sharing Yiddish than any other show I
know.

Now that my Yiddish has improved I can recognize it even in
the most unexpected places, like, for example, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when an overly appreciative Marvin Acme
tells Jessica Rabbit that she “farshmaysned” (slaughtered) her adoring audience.
This example gets extra points for the wonderfully cavalier mash-up of a Yiddish
verb (farshmaysn) with English verb ending (-ed); Yiddish is great for this
kind of multi-lingual grammatical construction. After all, what’s the point of a diasporic
language if you can’t combine a Hebrew word with a Slavic prefix and then
pluralize it according to Germanic grammar? But my absolute favourite
unexpected Yiddish moment comes in Robert Hamer’s beautifully bleak post-war
noir The Long Memory (1953), when
John Slater calls Fred Johnson ”You shiker old shnorer” (that is, “You drunken
old beggar”). What’s most amusing about this example is that the subtitles on
the DVD don’t even try to work out the Yiddish, instead rather imaginatively transforming
Slater’s line into “You old slurry”. That does have a certain estuarine suitability,
what with the scene taking place on a Thames riverboat, but someone, somewhere,
really dropped the ball on that one.

Of course, the problem with these examples is that they’re
nowhere near conversational Yiddish, which is completely understandable but
still disappointing for an obsessive like myself. There are some contemporary Yiddish
treasures out there, but you do need to look for them. The opening scene of the
Cohen brothers’ A Serious Man is a
very good effort, introducing me as it did to the concept of a דיבוק (dybbuk) courtesy of the
legendary and much lamented Fyvush Finkel. If all dybbuks were this adorable, who’d be scared of them?

And yet despite its atmospheric heft, this scene doesn’t really represent
conversational Yiddish, at least, not as my family would have spoken it.
There’s nothing wrong with the grammar or anything technical like that, it’s
more that the language feels a little stagey, as though the characters are
talking in proverbs. In fact, once this scene is over there’s no other Yiddish
in the film, so it tends to perpetuate the misconception that Yiddish is simply
part of that lost other world of European Jewry. That’s not the Yiddish I know,
which is resolutely here and now rather than still languishing in some freezing
shtetl, but it has been surprisingly difficult to find modern, conversational
Yiddish represented in popular culture.

This is why we should all be thankful for the existence of Yidlife Crisis AKA Jamie Elman and Eli
Batalion, two absolute reprobates and unrepentant gannets who have managed to
capture Yiddish in all its filthy, food-centric glory. Discovering their web
series was cause for much rejoicing, not least because at last I could hear
Yiddish being spoken like any other living language, full of word-play and
silliness as well as some Grade-A swearing.

These guys learnt Yiddish at High School in Montreal (there’s
a pattern developing here) so have something of a linguistic head-start, but
listening to them rip on each other and the world at large in the language I
love most is an emesdike mekhaye (true delight). The only problem is, whenever
I watch an episode I end up ravenously hungry. Damn, those guys can eat. But in
the absence of Yiddish that I can overhear in the street, this is enough to remind me
that the mame-loshn is alive and well, if a little overly obsessed with poutine.

Thursday, 22 September 2016

[NB: Just a
brief introductory note on the premise underpinning these ‘reviews’ (a rather
too rigid term for the fluid responses we’ve produced, but it will have to suffice
for now): Rashomon (1950), for those
who've seen it, is an Akira Kurosawa film about a brutal incident that takes
place in the woods, the chief narrative innovation of which revolves around the
fact that the film takes the form of characters' differing interpretations of
events, which communicate at cross purposes with one another, and will
often flat-out contradict what the audience has already seen and ‘interpreted’
themselves. Our Rashomon ‘review’
series, inaugurated with these responses to Kubo and the Two Strings (quite an
appropriate choice, as it happens, given that Kubo…’s plot revolves around the narrative possibilities of memory,
and is steeped in samurai-era Japanese history and folklore), applies the
same premise of competing ‘eye-witness accounts’ to the field of
reviewing, with hopefully valuable, or at the very least enjoyable results.]

1: Flo's Response

I was convinced,
throughout the film, that the cockroach was voiced by George Clooney.

I spent every
moment of his time on screen trying to see elements of Clooney’s face in the
cockroach’s features. I thought about Antz and how they made Weaver look so
much like Sylvester Stallone, and Z so much like Woody Allen, and how that
marked my expectation for animation to match reality by creating a visual tie
between the person providing the voice and the character appearing to speak
with that voice. When the credits came up and I saw it was Matthew McConaughey,
I briefly felt annoyed with myself in a very nerdy way. Come to think of it,
the cockroach looked a lot more like McConaughey than I first realised.

*

In the row behind
me, there was a kid sitting between his parents, asking questions throughout
the entire film: who is this, what is that, why is she crying, how did he get
there, was that a chicken? It felt like watching the entire thing with the
director’s commentary turned on, except it was that small voice inside the
director that isn’t grown up, isn’t in charge, and isn’t entirely sure what it
is contributing its energy towards. That same voice inside me started the film
obsessed with the title: two strings? Why two strings? What do they refer to?
The shamisen has three strings, so why two? What is happening? There was no
mummy or daddy for me to ask these questions, and George (not Clooney) gets
confused when I talk during films, so I sat there stewing, like the impatient
child behind me, watching but really waiting for answers.

*

When the action,
the music, and the visual beauty picked up, I got swept into the story, and I
suppose that’s the point. When I emerged, I realised I had been watching
strings upon strings, a writhing heap of strings.

*

Another thing I
hadn’t realised going into the film (I don’t pay attention to film posters or
reviews, clearly) was that the whole thing was rendered mostly in stop-motion
animation, which, after so many CGI animated films, wasn’t something I’d
expected. It explains my strong reaction to the film’s textures, the minutes I
spent marvelling over the slightly translucent appearance of the skin around
the monkey’s mouth and eyes, the ropey texture of the character’s hair, which,
according to this article
is real human hair coated in silicone and held in place with tiny wires.

*

Kubo’s magic, too,
is held together by strings and wires. In fact, so much of the film contains
the strings of its title. Playing the shamisen brings to life the sheets of
origami paper Kubo carries in his backpack; they fly around his head and take on
shapes that allow him to turn the story of his family into puppet-theatre for
people in the marketplace to enjoy. Kubo plucks the strings and the paper folds
itself into his father the warrior, into the pieces of armour his father must
find, and into the Moon King, whom his father must defeat. And then it folds
itself into a belligerent chicken, for laughs. Laughs are an important part of
storytelling, an old lady tells Kubo; in fact, the whole film can be read as a
class in storytelling, and in the value of translating life’s events,
especially the big, otherwise inexplicable and cruel ones such as the death of
parents and heartless actions of relatives, into stories.

*

What struck me most
was the message of forgiveness at the end. The idea that reincarnation and
memories are linked, and that they make forgiveness possible because they imply
transformation rather than things being stuck in a single shape forever: death
is not the end of all things because things continue to exist and transform
through stories, through memories, and they live alongside us. The forgiveness
Kubo offers his grandfather is touching because it involves the entire
community, who all offer the old man new memories, new parts of his identity to
replaces the ones he has lost. He is no longer the Moon King, but he can now
continue his existence as Kubo’s grandfather. The strings are ties between
people, ties made visible by stories and memories, by the way we related to one
another.

*

The story Kubo
tells is the story as told to him by his mother, when she isn’t lost in an
amnesiac state of sadness. At the beginning of the story, the very beginning,
when Kubo’s mother hits her head against a rock, we don’t yet know the role
memories will play in this story, and yet this is the moment she loses control
over hers. When she dies, she returns to Kubo briefly in the form of a monkey,
and she ties the strand of hair he ripped from her head around his wrist. To protect
him, she says. When the Moon King threatens to take his other eye in the final
confrontation, Kubo ties the hair to his instrument and uses it as a string.
The memory of the mother held by the hair is brought to life on the shamisen,
in the same way that the monkey-shaped trinket can hold the mother’s
personality and come to life as a companion on Kubo’s quest, to help him
survive. Kubo wears his father’s robes in hopes of ‘growing into them’, and
before she dies his mother puts a spell on them so that they may fly him away
when he needs them to. Much in this universe is designed to help Kubo, to
protect and support him, pull him forward or help him land in a safety net,
provided he does the hard work. In a way, this is a nice analogy for what we would
all hope our parents would do for us: let us walk our own path, but be there
when we get into trouble.

﻿

2: Rochelle's Response

Having
spent a fair amount of time in the last couple of weeks watching, obsessing
over and writing about Coraline, our
trip to see Kubo and the Two Strings
felt remarkably well-timed. If you’d
asked me beforehand what I thought I’d find most exciting about the film, I’d
have said something about the craft of its construction (who doesn’t love stop
motion puppets of talking monkeys?), or its visual impact. In fact, what struck me most was the gap
between the comparative safety of the world of Coraline and the very real (and indeed fulfilled) sense of threat
in Kubo.There’s nothing cosy or evasive about Kubo’s take on mortality and loss, which
is precisely why the film works so well.

I
grew up on a steady intake of Disney films replete with exploding pit ponies
and maimed dogs, to say nothing of the
shooting of Bambi’s mum, but those stories incorporated death as a tonal counterpoint
to the wholesome optimism of the rest of the narrative. Just for the record, if it had been the
winsome child protagonists of Escape from
the Dark who had been blown up in that mine I wouldn’t have given a toss,
but that pony dying absolutely destroyed me. However, I knew that Kubo… was of a different order of magnitude right from the opening
sequence, when the audience is introduced to baby Kubo, already one-eyed thanks
to his Moon King grandfather’s zealously enforced views about not mixing in
with the mortals. In Coraline, the protagonist is threatened
with having her eyes replaced with buttons, but it’s a pretty empty threat. Coraline
belongs to that tradition of fairytales where the resourceful child defies,
battles and defeats the powerful monster. Her lost parents are returned unharmed and
completely unaware that they were ever in any danger at all.

Kubo…, on the other hand, doesn’t screw
around. Kubo’s mother, Sariatu, is
killed not once but twice (once as herself and once as Monkey, Kubo’s
guardian), both times at the hands of her own sisters, two psychotic masked
assassins whose weapons of choice are what look like silver porpoise harpoons. Kubo’s father, Hanzo, previously presumed
dead, has no sooner been revealed in his new identity as Beetle than he too is
unceremoniously dispatched by one of the Sisters. The fact the Sisters are after Kubo’s
remaining eye is, by this stage in proceedings, rather light relief. By the end Kubo has been orphaned twice over,
and has to fight his lunatic grandfather singlehanded, with nary an origami
samurai for support. Even Bambi got to
keep his dad, for Christ’s sake. Give
the kid a break.

I
think that it was around about the time of Hanzo getting nailed that I realised
that this film is managing to achieve something quite remarkable, namely, a
frank and open discussion of death that isn’t likely to scar child audiences
for life. Written as a list of tragic
casualties, Kubo might be in danger
of sounding rather brutal, but the deaths of Kubo’s parents contribute to a
much broader awareness and acceptance of mortality within the film. To start with, two pivotal scenes take place
within a cemetery, which is not seen as a place of fear or horror but of
collective remembrance. The Obon
ceremony that opens and closes the main narrative doesn’t represent bereavement
as something to be challenged or denied, but rather as a burden than can be
lightened by being publically acknowledged and shared. Kubo
even challenges the notion that the only fulfilling response to loss is
vengeance, breaking another long-cherished narrative axiom.

This
would all be extraordinary enough, but the film sites this unexpectedly
balanced discussion of death within a visual landscape that itself reflects the
inevitability of decay and dissolution. Kubo
first encounters Beetle in a snowy version of Shelley’s Ozymandias, where enormous fallen idols litter a barren tundra. It’s left to the audience to imagine the fate
of whatever civilization was represented by these ruins, but the later scenes
in what was once Hanzo’s ancestral home replicate that destruction on a
domestic and far more affecting scale. The film acknowledges not only the merciless swiftness
with which loss can occur, but also lets the audience imagine how happy Kubo’s
life could have been had that loss been preventable. Magic powers or not, the lad is really put
through the wringer.

Ultimately,
Kubo… admits that mortality is a
universal force that generates both horror and beauty. On one side there’s the skeleton guardian of
the Sword Unbreakable, a lurching, slack-jawed horror that reconstitutes itself
from a scattered array of bones and griblets in order to attack our heroes. However, on the other, there is the gorgeously
ethereal ship composed of fallen autumn leaves, which Kubo creates in order to
sail across the Long Lake. Any film that
offers children (and adults) such an honest and complex discussion of loss and
death, beautifully crafted or otherwise, is a powerful piece of magic.

3: George's Response

I’ve been marking a trend in recent(ish)
films with child-protagonists, which show children not just as vacant, happy
ciphers, but as thinking, feeling beings [1]. Films like Inside Out and Where the
Wild Things Are, spaced apart, might not add up to a clear picture, but
there’s a pattern with a particular interest in seeing how children deal with
depressed parents and similarly ‘mature’ emotional challenges.

Kubo and the Two Strings fits into this
category. It reminded me of someone I
once taught whose child had been diagnosed with ADHD and similar ‘disorders’ by
the school system. Eventually the parent
took the child to a child psychologist, who diagnosed stress caused by a
threatening teacher. The child changed
schools and the behaviours associated with stress – not some kind of
fucked up mental disorder, which frankly, is power’s way of labelling
behaviours and points of view they don’t deign to work with – dissipated. (You
might actually think of the various mental states in Where the Wild Things
Are as nothing more complicated as potential behavioural responses to the
stress of relocation.)

The opening sequence to Kubo… set me
thinking in terms of how cycles of parenting and patriarchy (the film’s
specific power hierarchy traces back to the grandfather, the Moon King) ground
behavioural patterns and neuroses in children. The film’s premise and the various brief
synopses I read about it, pitch the film as examining how a child becomes a
carer to a depressed (single) parent and then sets about having a life of his
own. Which, once the film begins and the
initial backstory is done with, establishes Kubo firmly in the realm of
fantasy.

Kubo is a hardy little tyke, forced from a
young age into the role of carer for his depressed mother. He earns money by using his magic, and a
broken guitar-like instrument, a samisen, to tell stories with origami paper in
the nearby village’s marketplace. He
seems indestructible: he’s the servant to the parental drama playing out, in
some ways, a godlike device able to triumph over all. His one-eyed vision has absolutely no bearing
on the film’s perspective, or his ability to operate in the world – he’s a dead
shot with a bow and arrow, despite the lack of depth perception. Frankly, the only reason he has one eye is for
plot purposes: it gives his grandfather something to do.

The presentation of the mother’s depression
is relatively simplistic (reminiscent of the father in Submarine). She’s an enervated sop prone to trailing off
mid-sentence and staring for long stretches at nothing. Yet a key addition to
her depressive state is a short-lived manic phase that takes her in the
evening, when she continues the story Kubo broke off from telling in the
marketplace, earlier the same day.

This moment is perhaps my favourite. The narrative structure is technically
wonderful, extending the story we (and the marketplace audience) were
disappointed by for its lack of ending. And
again the story-within-a-story doesn’t finish (sacrilege!): the mother’s manic
phase soon dwindles and the delight we, and Kubo, briefly shared at her
animation – an emotional joy for its contrast with her depression; for the
sense that she’s finally ‘performing as a mother should toward her child’; and
the magical way she tells the story – all end so suddenly, it’s as if we’ve
been given a slender vision of the beautiful life Kubo might be living, and
then it’s snatched away.

It’s heartbreaking, tender, perfectly
pitched. And at the same time, it weaves
together the story we thought Kubo has been making up, and his real life. The storyteller becomes the story with all the
panache and pathos of a double pluck on your heartstrings. And it’s the way stories are told that really
moves: the magical samisen animates paper and leaves and sets them folding and
spinning into visual metaphors for the stories he tells. The plucky, samisen-inspired soundtrack
underwriting each story is simultaneously minimalistic in its melodies and
rhythms and also full of space to draw you in, as an audience member, to create
the characters yourself. Of course,
that’s a deception – the film itself provides orchestration, depth, colour,
visuals – our imaginations are fully saturated in many ways by the animation’s
lush stop-motion-meets-CGI – but I couldn’t help feeling it was using a kind of
deliberate crudeness, keeping the focus simple, the narratives very much those
of a boy with a head full of adventures, so as to allow the emotion to bubble
up.

Once the epic quest begins, there’s not
much to it at first: Kubo picks up companions, magical or weird, or otherwise,
and then plods off for some frivolous ‘find these three items and battle the
boss’ quest episodes. And then, and
then, the bits you suspected, but weren’t quite sure the film was clever enough
to grasp, really do come to the fore: the companions take on increasing
emotional significance and the underlying problem of power structures become
psychological drivers of Kubo’s own life story.

I found myself thinking in loose (and, yes,
sure, crudely informed) psychoanalytic terms for what then plays out. But that’s the film’s strength: it doesn’t let
the superficial quest take over from the heart of it, which is an interrogation
of the psychology of a grieving child-turned-carer.

[Spoiler
season!]

And yet, and yet: I didn’t like the ending!
Seriously, after all that panache and
style and pathos, Kubo’s final conclusion about the nature of storytelling, for
all its tugging at the heartstrings, didn’t speak to me. I think that it was too easily earned and too
one-sided. That’s it, really: it
simplifies the role of stories, which is especially heinous for me given how
the stories he tells throughout the film are so wonderfully rich. They are escapist, yet morally they cycle back
to the moment; they’re ways of imagining future possibilities, so they’re a
critique of the past and present; and yes, in a small way they serve memory,
but not solely in terms of the film’s own conclusion – stories are containers
for the memories of those we loved – but also that they’re ways to make sense
of the emotional trauma caused to us by the world, by the people we loved.

Underlying Kubo…’s main narrative
thrust are hints of a deeper, possibly even sadder tale: that of how the
grandfather turned into such a right royal bastard. The final good vs evil
conclusion, the dissipation of the worm-pop-moon-king in a wave of orange
light, reneges on the commitment to psychological depth and grieving I felt the
film made early on, and which sustained me throughout.

Yes, OK, you have to end somewhere. But the
hasty retreat from the implications of Kubo’s development are too much a
conservative, or conforming,swerve for
my tastes. The wonder of the
storytelling throughout really means so much more than that: storytelling is a
vital tool for helping Kubo makes sense of loss, depression and the threats in
the adult world. And that’s more than
just a container, it’s vitality itself.

===

[1] Not that they’re not fun, but it took a
few sequels for one of the adopted kids in the Despicable Me franchise
to develop some depth. As much as I
enjoyed the one-sidedness of the humour of a joyous child who hugs monsters and
overcomes adult social boundaries, really, it wears off quickly, whereas the
emotional depth of Inside Out, which is the film’s focus, held my
attention throughout and still stays with me. And that, even as I acknowledge
the faults in the metaphors/patterns used to make sense of theinternal/external worlds.

4: Simon's Response (after Brainard, après Perec)

I remember, a few days
before seeing the film, a conversation with friends during which I worried at
length that recent children’s films seemed petrified of honestly scaring their audiences, favouring
instead the kind of after-school lessons about tolerance and friendship that
always ruined Inspector Gadget and Masters of the Universe when I was a
kid; and how happy I was that Kubo…
pulled no punches in the terror department.(If I had had access to a cushion, I would most likely have hidden
behind it.)

I remember a scene on
the shore of a vast lake in which leaves tumbled end over end in an increasing
breeze past the camera, disappearing at the right hand edge of the frame, the
gale blowing them rising in intensity as the scene progressed, then suddenly
dissipating, then the camera pulling back to reveal a gorgeous multi-coloured
skiff entirely composed of fallen leaves: a vessel of autumn, waiting on the
placid waters.

I remember an animated
origami chicken that breathed fire and shot out eggs like cannonballs during
one of Kubo’s storytelling sessions in the village square, and finding myself a
trifle disappointed that the audience wasn’t provided with a full-sized
equivalent later in the movie.Something
to consider for a sequel?

I remember being
mightily impressed by Matthew McConaughey’s pitch-perfect George Clooney impression throughout, and
thinking “This is nearly on a par with Tony Curtis’ take on Cary Grant’s
impossible mid-Atlantic tones in Some
Like It Hot.Nearly, but not quite.”

I remember being
surprised at the viciousness of the onscreen violence – the battle between
Monkey and the aunts on the autumnal leaf-boat was particularly visceral, for
example – and thinking that there’s arguably something inherent in stop-motion
animation that lends these actions a physical heft (and a concomitant level of
threat) they might be denied if rendered in CGI.

I remember liking the
fact that Monkey is somehow simultaneously comforting and mildly frightening,
and thinking that a great deal of that is due to Charlize Theron’s vocal
authority.

I remember enjoying
the pedantic joke about Paper Samurai not beingthe product of ‘real’ origami (real origami involves folding only,
apparently; ‘cheating’ origami involves cutting in addition), and wondering
whether this might be a sly nudge in the ribs of stop-motion purists who would
otherwise be tempted to critique Kubo…
for its (modest) deployment of CGI.

I remember being
thrilled at the post-credits sequence, where the animators pull the curtain, so
to speak, to one side, and let us witness in time-lapse the filming of the
skeleton battle; thrilled because at no point had I assumed the skeleton was to
scale in relation to the characters, but had to be the product of some kind of
trickery, but here it was, real as daylight, and quite intimidatingly large,
even provided with the knowledge that it’s only a puppet.

I remember finding
Kubo’s villainous aunts just a smidgen alluring, and wondering the film-makers
had planned this, or whether this was just my own personal kink.

I remember thinking
that eyes are given an almost fetishistic role to play in the narrative of Kubo… – for example, the Moon King wants
to steal Kubo’s remaining (right) eye, having already divested him of his left [2];
there’s a forest of eyes beneath the ocean which can see into our innermost
beings – and what that might mean in the context of a movie who’s protagonist
is repeatedly telling us, and our onscreen analogues, not to blink.

I remember the tactile
crunch and whisper of snow beneath the characters’ feet as they trudged through
the ice-bound ruins of some lost civilisation.

I remember thinking “Jason and the Argonauts” during the
battle with the twelve-storey high skeleton with swords puncturing its skull, like
a foil-covered baked potato pierced with sausage-wielding cocktail sticks at a
Guy Fawkes party in the mid- to late-1980s.

I remember thinking
“The witch and the tornado are one.”

I remember
exhilaration.

I remember laughter.

I remember terror.

I remember wonder.

I remember, in
retrospect, giving some thought to why so many of my favourite films place
their own making at the foreground of their narratives – make a narrative of
narrative – and thinking it might have something to do with a division in
myself: that I want immersion at all costs, on the one hand; but conversely, I
am happiest when that immersion does not come at the cost of audience awareness
and autonomy, as though I were telling the film-makers, “Trick me, by all means,
trick me with all of your strength, but don’t let me for an instant forget it’s a trick!”

I remember crying,
just a little, when the lamps lit up.

===

[2] I
remember thinking, too, that a storyline involving a monstrous family member
who wants to mutilate the main character’s eyes seemed an odd choice for a
family-friendly animated movie, but then I got distracted by Matthew
McConaughey’s Beetle character falling on his back and being
unable to get back up, and didn’t give the matter a second thought until
now.

Wednesday, 21 September 2016

The nominative singular of the first person
pronoun, the object of self-consciousness, the ego, denies that it has ceased
to hear, see, or understand, or is in any way unable to find its way among the
characteristics or possibilities of the composition & compilation of
dictionaries to any great extent,

certainly not to the extent that it has
failed to remember or think upon the fact that the units of spoken language, or
the written signs representing said utterances, are the female descendents
deriving or proceeding from the matter upon the surface of the globe (soil,
that is, a mixture of disintegrated rock & organic material in which roots
are planted),

nor, in addition, that that which exists or
can be thought upon, including, though not restricted to, inanimate objects,
are the male children or offspring of the vault of sky overhanging the earth,
the upper regions of the air, the mythical dwelling place of God (or the gods)
& of the blessed.

ii

Yours truly, your humble narrator,
repudiates the claim that I am in any way so monomaniacally absorbed in
onomatology & its related disciplines as to have no remembrance or
recollection of the fact that lexemes are the heiresses of terra firma, & that material artefacts are chips off the old
block of the empyrean.

א

Can you, the other, confirm the unverified
rumours that you have become so dissipated & distracted in your pursuit of
the painterly arts as to have furnished yourself with a prodigious memory
regarding the degree to which watercolours are not the mothers of the ether,
& nor are the phantoms of our imagination the fountainheads of the Inferno?

iii

I am not so legitimate in lilageni as to
forget that yams are the decibels of the ectoblast, & that thuribles are
the soup of hendiadys.

I am not so lesser in ligers as to forget
that yachts are the decease of econometrics, & that thuds are the sou of Hemerocullis.

I am not so limbic in lieder as to forget
that Xhosas are the decal of an eclipse, & that thrombi are the sorrel of
hellions.

I am not so literal in lichgates as to
forget that wushu is the debt of echinoderms, & that threnodies are a
sorbus of helicopters.

I am not so littoral in libido as to forget
that wrens are the death of ecclesiastics, & that thorps are the sophomores
of hegemony.

I am not so lonely in libations as to
forget that worth is the Davy Jones of the eaves, & that Thomism is the
sonnet of hectors.

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, & that things are the sons of heaven.

Monday, 19 September 2016

necrophage, n.[...] Chiefly Zool.
An organism, esp. an insect, that feeds on dead bodies or tissue. Also in extended use.

1940 Q. Rev. Biol. 15 48/2 Animals dependent on primary foods (green plants) are primary animals... Fungivores, necrophages, and coprophages are low secondaries.
1965 B. E. Freeman tr. A. Vandel Biospeleol. xix. 328 It is generally impossible to classify a cavernicole as a humiphage, xylophage, mycophage, coprophage, or necrophage.
1982 Science 10 Sept. 1059/1 No other protein sources are used by T[rigona] hypogea, and pollen transporting structures have been lost, making this species an obligate necrophage.
1994 P. J. Gullan & P. S. Cranston Insects viii. 207/2 The typical sequence of corpse necrophages, saprophages and their parasites is often referred to as following ‘waves’ of colonization.
1995 Times 20 Jan. 35/2 Hunger can make necrophages of us all.

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A Japanese poetry student of Ezra Pound's, on being asked what makes a poem, responded "It should contain gists and piths."Gists and Piths is a blog dedicated to the discussion and publication of contemporary poetry, fiction, film, visual art, and everything in between. Here you'll find book reviews, interviews, enraged post-modernist manifestoes, long-form essays and much more.